The lower house of the German parliament, known as the Bundestag, has approved a new bill that would require search engines to pay a license fee for re-publishing content longer than "individual words or short excerpts." The bill passed by a vote of 293 to 243, with three abstentions.

However, the law does not define exactly what such a “snippet” would entail. For the law to take effect, it would need to be ratified by the upper house of the German parliament, the Bundesrat. By all accounts, this bill is a watered-down version of what had originally been lobbied for by the German publishing and media industry.

Not surprisingly, Google has opposed this law and proposals like it in neighboring France.

“As a result of today’s vote, ancillary copyright in its most damaging form has been stopped,” Google said in a statement. “However, the best outcome for Germany would be no new legislation because it threatens innovation, particularly for start-ups. It’s also not necessary because publishers and Internet companies can innovate together, just as Google has done in many other countries.”

Still, the publishing industry seems to be fairly satisfied that they managed to get something passed through the Bundestag.

“With the right legal conditions and the technical tools provided by the Linked Content Coalition, it will be easy to access and use content legally,” the European Publishers Council said in a statement (PDF) on Friday. “This will mean that publishers will have the incentive to continue to populate the internet with high-quality, authoritative, diverse content and to support new, innovative business models for online content.”

Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is due out in May 2018 from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar

So basically, google is already protected because they don't copy whole articles?

Yeah I'm not sure what this accomplished.

I'm not sure how German courts compare to the US, but if that law passed in the US what it would accomplish is initiating a court case that takes at least a decade to resolve, costing billions of dollars, eventually ending with a settlement rather than a ruling so no legal precedent is established.

This type of legislation is baffling. Europe has done a better job of connecting its citizens to the Internet than North America, but then a government like Germany totally drops the ball by pandering to clueless businesses.

Anything above a "short excerpt" is covered by copyright already. The only thing it does now is spread fear and confusion among bloggers who critically concern themselves with press articles. Especially because it is worded willfully imprecise. Quoting more than some words could bring you in trouble, as most bloggers neither have the time for nor can they bear the financial risk of a lawsuit against a big publisher.

What I think to be a real scandal is that there were suggestions for including a hard number as a lower limit for snippets, but it was deliberately left out. Our constitution does have a part demanding precision and predictability of laws. If you read through decisions from the constitutional court detailing how precise laws have to be, this one is just outright crazy.

So in the end the law that was intended to milk Google now excludes Google and just adds a lot of legal uncertainty. It is a prime example of how broken out legislation is.

I think there is a fair chance this stupidity will be stopped in the Bundesrat, as the opposition has a majority there. It is also noteworthy that this law was opposed from politicians all accross the spectrum. A high-profile member of Chancellor Merkels party (which otherwise supports this bill) recently noted that the publishers are already able to prevent indexing of their content, but *choose* not do do so.

In other news, a group of german publishers presented a Kindle-ripoff yesterday. It is just like the Kindle Paperwhite, except that you are barred from accessing Amazon and still have to put up with DRM. Now they want to lobby for lower tax on e-books. Some will never learn.

They're trying to stop Google "stealing" their content and reprinting it in Google News, not stop them indexing it. Unfortunately, Google forced news organisations to either have their content on Google News, or have it not indexed on Google at all.

Nothing is reprinted on Google News. It shows the headline, about 10 words from the first sentence, and then links you to the article. No different than how the search engine works.

I think there is a fair chance this stupidity will be stopped in the Bundesrat, as the opposition has a majority there. It is also noteworthy that this law was opposed from politicians all accross the spectrum. A high-profile member of Chancellor Merkels party (which otherwise supports this bill) recently noted that the publishers are already able to prevent indexing of their content, but *choose* not do do so.

In other news, a group of german publishers presented a Kindle-ripoff yesterday. It is just like the Kindle Paperwhite, except that you are barred from accessing Amazon and still have to put up with DRM. Now they want to lobby for lower tax on e-books. Some will never learn.

Citation needed. Where did you read that? I tried Spiegel but to no avail.

I think there is a fair chance this stupidity will be stopped in the Bundesrat, as the opposition has a majority there. It is also noteworthy that this law was opposed from politicians all accross the spectrum. A high-profile member of Chancellor Merkels party (which otherwise supports this bill) recently noted that the publishers are already able to prevent indexing of their content, but *choose* not do do so.

In other news, a group of german publishers presented a Kindle-ripoff yesterday. It is just like the Kindle Paperwhite, except that you are barred from accessing Amazon and still have to put up with DRM. Now they want to lobby for lower tax on e-books. Some will never learn.

Citation needed. Where did you read that? I tried Spiegel but to no avail.

'txtr Beagle perhaps? It's German-made, 10Euros, has DRM, and basically is a ripoff of the design of the Kindle Paperwhite - in fact worse than anything Samsung has ever done in the ripoff dept.

I think there is a fair chance this stupidity will be stopped in the Bundesrat, as the opposition has a majority there. It is also noteworthy that this law was opposed from politicians all accross the spectrum. A high-profile member of Chancellor Merkels party (which otherwise supports this bill) recently noted that the publishers are already able to prevent indexing of their content, but *choose* not do do so.

In other news, a group of german publishers presented a Kindle-ripoff yesterday. It is just like the Kindle Paperwhite, except that you are barred from accessing Amazon and still have to put up with DRM. Now they want to lobby for lower tax on e-books. Some will never learn.

Citation needed. Where did you read that? I tried Spiegel but to no avail.

'txtr Beagle perhaps? It's German-made, 10Euros, has DRM, and basically is a ripoff of the design of the Kindle Paperwhite - in fact worse than anything Samsung has ever done in the ripoff dept.

As far as i read, the beagle is not available and its a colaboration between txtr and Asus. The latest news are from last rear which said that it will be available with a wireless plan (only).http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Txtr {only german}

So google can't publish anything longer then a "Individual Word"So you will now end up something like

SPIEGEL ONLINE - Cra and have to guess what the article is about.Is it about Crabs? Cranes? Cracks? Crap? Crafty? Craving?I knew Germany was desperate for money, but this is sad. Countries need to first start need to learn to stop allowing the rich to use loop holes to do tax evasions through their business. Before making silly laws on other things.

Same shit, different day. Some people just don't get the Internet, and I don't think it's worth saving them from their self selected fate. We just need to minimize collateral damage, and get this over as fast as possible.

Currently, snippets can be disabled independently of general indexing. If I were Google, I'd switch that to an opt-in system, put a note about it on the help site, and add a legal disclaimer beginning with "By opting into snippets, you grant us a... license to reproduce small fragments of your site for the purposes of..." The SEO people would ensure every major site on the planet was opted-in within 5 picoseconds of the change, and it would utterly gut these ridiculous laws.

The easy solution for Google is to answer German searches for news sites by providing them with the news - provided by French websites. The Bundestag members would then hear loud and clear from the people who elected them and would prefer not to learn French.

In other news, a group of german publishers presented a Kindle-ripoff yesterday. It is just like the Kindle Paperwhite, except that you are barred from accessing Amazon and still have to put up with DRM. Now they want to lobby for lower tax on e-books. Some will never learn.

Citation needed. Where did you read that? I tried Spiegel but to no avail.

The e-reader is called “tolino”. The Tagesschau has a short article[1]; Focus has some technical details and an interview, which touches on the need for further “regulation”[2].

Publishers demanded this law (well, a more draconian form of it anyway) and the government was quick to announce how important and valuable journalism is and how Google was preying on the publishers.

After a while it became clear just how wrong they were and that the first draft of this law would probably be unconstitutional. But since they voiced so loud about it before, they wouldn't just scrap it, which would clearly have been the logical solution. Instead they watered it down so much that it's basically useless now. As a result it's so imprecisely worded that it will probably lead to quite a few lawsuits until courts have decided how it should actually be interpreted.

So, once again, our legislators leave it to the judicature to actually write their laws for them.

I'm not sure how German courts compare to the US, but if that law passed in the US what it would accomplish is initiating a court case that takes at least a decade to resolve, costing billions of dollars, eventually ending with a settlement rather than a ruling so no legal precedent is established.

The basic process will be quite similar, although german courts are known to act a little faster. So instead of a decade you can expect a time frame of app. 2-3 years in courts. The process could be shortened significantly if at any point the lawsuit goes directly to the constitutional court (which is possible in several circumstances). The law has actually a high chance to be invalidated by that court, as it can be considered to be too vague.

It has to be noted though, the law is not yet in effect. Is has to be ratified by the Bundesrat (which is akin to the american Senate), which is not a given as majorities are different there. It wouldn't be unusual for a lobbied law to be watered down and then die somewhere in the political process.

In other news, a group of german publishers presented a Kindle-ripoff yesterday. It is just like the Kindle Paperwhite, except that you are barred from accessing Amazon and still have to put up with DRM. Now they want to lobby for lower tax on e-books. Some will never learn.

That's a bit harsh. The new Tolino is simply another ePub reader. Like Sony's or Kobo's it comes with its own online store but you're free to use it with any ePub (with or without DRM) from other sources.

Is it necessary to push yet another eReader on the market? Who knows. But it's not nearly as dumb as the law discussed in this article.

As for the Amazon issue: There's no eReader out there that supports both Adobe's and and Amazon's DRM out of the box, since licensing terms do not allow for it. (Not sure if Adobe or Amazon or even both are to blame for that.)

This type of legislation is baffling. Europe has done a better job of connecting its citizens to the Internet than North America, but then a government like Germany totally drops the ball by pandering to clueless businesses.

It's not German society, it's the Bundestag, and only a bare majority. You know that breed of cynical politicians. The same everywhere. Give them a bribe -- er, a campaign contribution and a rationale for plausible deniability, and they'll do whatever their masters command. Maybe for once the German people will unelect them.

It's not German society, it's the Bundestag, and only a bare majority. You know that breed of cynical politicians. The same everywhere. Give them a bribe -- er, a campaign contribution and a rationale for plausible deniability, and they'll do whatever their masters command. Maybe for once the German people will unelect them.

If the current opposition were in charge, they would have also passed that law. Neither red nor green have any fundamental interest in a free internet nor do they challenge a strict as possible copyright regime.

If Google ceased indexing Germany news sites, I wonder how long it would take for the news publishers to be up in arms over lack of page views. *sigh* this would appear to be yet another classic case of the spread of knowledge being stifled by nothing more than a willful lack of understanding by legacy bodies.

I really don't understand their attitude, it's almost as if they actively seeking ignorance instead of progress and knowledge.